


catch the light

by audentis



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Apocalyptic, Mentions of Death, Mild Angst with a happy ending, i wouldnt want to hurt anyone just yet, its very mild angst don't worry, random vent fic really so i dont know how to tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 08:36:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26969104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audentis/pseuds/audentis
Summary: Catch the light before it fades, catch the light before it dissipates, catch the light in your palms and hold it close to where it belongs.The darkness may come and overcast the fields with heathened skies, but darling, you are my light, and I will be there to catch you when you fall.
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Bokuto Koutarou
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	catch the light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nickyeowl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nickyeowl/gifts).



> this is my first time posting on here in a month but school has been kicking my ass so :')) this is my second 10k+ fic and considering i've never written anything like this i'm kinda proud of it i rushed this a little though and i didn't flesh everything out as much as i would have liked but i hope you still like it regardless :)
> 
> also this is dedicated to nicke~ happy birthday! ;D

[Catch the light before it fades, catch the light before it dissipates, catch the light in your palms and hold it close to where it belongs.]

_“The smog over Tokyo continues to thicken despite renewed efforts by the Ministry to systematically dissipate it. Minister Okizaka, in a speech yesterday morning, promised the public that they had promising options at their disposal, and are willing to deploy them as soon as possible.”_

Humanity has always prided itself with fighting wars they saw victory in, even if it was counterproductively embattling themselves. There were parameters to these, of course, tangibility, strategic advantage, the ability to dissect the enemy before their very eyes, intertwining them in a haunting dance of fate. But militaristic conquest is such an outmandated thing, don’t you think? Because although there continue to be guns drawn and cannons fired on human flesh, it is not a sight to see in most advantaged neighborhoods.

But the past of cruel indistinguishability has never been pleasing to mankind, in the likeness it has never fettered on the wings of our ancestors, and Lady Fate, the mother of all harbinger’s sorrow has always treated our reality as more of a top balanced taut on Her string. And with all meddling games, she grew bored of the hollow pieces that walked across the map of the world, and so the days of torn skin and sprayed blood came to an end.

Yet, peace was always an artificial introduction in an archetypal universe, as was with all things good and pleasant so she declared a new game.

_“With our new found technology, we can ensure you we will be able to reintroduce some form of breathable air to the atmosphere before the end of this year. Anyone who has doubts in our project will tell you otherwise, but those who have faith like I can promise you this is the start of a new era.”_

With all the Queen’s men she gathered round Arthur’s table and pronounced that humanity required a new match. There were murmurs, but up stood the man dressed in white, but was no more a swirling vortex of winded dust, and he spoke of a challenge that would surely rival the toys she loved to entrap with her little twists. The perfect opponent, he said in a baritone voice of choked smoke, intangible, and no indesirable weakness, with the ability to clash with physicalities even before they were aware of an intrusion.

And she laughed, and they all laughed for the proposition was much too tempting. It was decreed that day that humanity would be given a new match, and it would be quite an entrancing tournament to see.

And years later to mindful entertainment, they watched it ravage like an infectious disease.

_“I’m saying that’s all government-generated propaganda. According to new statistics, it could be years before we even begin to see results from the filters they’re deploying, but for all we know, humanity could only have mere months before we’re overrun.”_

* * *

[Akaashi Keiji hated the world.]

“Akaashi-kun, wake up.”

The rough hand gripped his shoulders, easing his slump to the back of the chair. His eyes were still blurry, a little watery too, what time was it? He looked up to the vaulting sky, wondering why the gloom still hung at eight in the brisk summer morning, only to realize the recession his memory had made.

Stupid, he chided himself, Are you so lost, you’ve forgotten where you are?

“Sorry.” Anywhere but here, he sighed, rubbing his temples in a flood of exasperation rather than fatigue. Anywhere but this charred hellhole.

Kuroo patted him out of his god-awful posture that would have surely left him with an ache later in the day, not that it would matter either way. He would just find a new source of subjective pain like he always did. “No need to apologize, how’s your head?”

It was throbbing, and not in the essence that the invisible mallet came against the soft bone wall of his degrading skull, but also in the way that his vision seemed to drum with the rhythm of the hammering, an almost enchanting dance that would have been anything but humbling if it were not for his eyes being gouged out, and his mouth hanging loose to a guttural scream.

“Could be better.” Was all he said in response to the cacophonous symphony that was his brain decidedly frustrated at being overused yet again, but that leavening vexation seemed to be going around a lot these days, this housing under the translucent glass dome included.

“I’m guessing it didn’t go well.” Akaashi couldn’t remember the last time the world had written its pages to favor him in any way. It must have been years to the day since he’d last felt an inch of gratitude to the universal architects for calling him on once again to displace onto his shoulders the burden they had brought onto humanity.

“Transpiration levels are still off, probably worse than they were last time.” But why the hell had they condemned him to this forsaken place when there were millions of other galactic civilizations that probably existed closer to the center of the cosmos, ones that were flailing into the event horizon of some rapidly fluctuating black hole. At least then, he would have a clear picture of the hopelessness they painted.

“It’s ok, we never had high hopes anyway.” Kuroo said as if that were some kind of proper assurance that the world would continue to turn on its tipping axis if today would not define tomorrow. Yet it did, and that was the truth they had to start facing. The past defined today, and today defines tomorrow, and the inactivity that they generated would not help in the limbic survival of the next generation.

That is why they were all here, no matter how clouded that vision of salvation had become.

“The filters?” He asked, attempting to divert the subject of his flailing life’s work. Surely there was a little more hope in other triages, said the undaunted pessimist.

“Better now.” That was a surprise to hear considering he had been moaning about the progress they had made over the last two months, or lack thereof that is. To be amused or bemused was the question, until he realized the misunderstanding of the word “better”.

“What was wrong with them?”

“Same as always.” The weariness glittered in his eyes, he wasn’t much better off than Akaashi was, if anything he was worse having to make actual human contact. “They weren’t going fast enough, dust was clogging the tubes, and degrading the drainage system before they got any real work done, but they’ve built a brilliant work around system and we could have it up earlier than what we originally predicted.”

“So there is a little hope.” Sardonic. That was what it was. Hope did not have a key to the door that was a better future of the salvation of humanity, neither did it serve as a wall that shielded them from the hailstorm of dust and blood, but hope in its very essence seemed to be a catalyst for the rusting civilization, and no matter how much he despised the utterance of the defective word, it spoke volumes when he did.

Kuroo wrung his hands like he did when he got stressed, or thoughtful, or angry, or when he felt an ounce of human emotion which probably blistered the skin more than the gloves he was accustomed to wearing. “We just need to improve on a few things, and we’re home free.”

The question, the life long pessimist said, was not in the syntax and diction, but on the sincerity of the words that flowed from the ebbing tongue. Words could be twisted into something that was confoundedly brutal, yet could be designed to be as beautiful as the last living flower, therefore the tool of divergence engineered by the universal architects should never be trusted.

But the true power was not in the way words healed or scabbed at opened wounds, but how the trust extended passed any constructive parameter that had been laid into the soil that carried the victims of their lies. And so, in short, you could see it was not hope he hated the most, nor was it the unastounding proclamations that were heralded of rooftops, no, it was the tinges that came with every pitch and note and rise and fall of the waves that crept into the uncaring heart. It was the false sincerity that he hated with all the fires of Hell on this earth.

“Whatever you say.” His words did not carry sincerity.

“Hey, you keep working too.” The other said, not the least bit suspicious at the perplexity of the situation that had been brought into the ancient room. “This problem isn’t about to fix itself and our only solution is somewhere in this room.”

“And you’re so sure about that?” It was almost comical the way that hope sprang back from the depths of the rivers beneath, and latched onto you until you gave way to its broken hymns.

“Go home and get some rest. You’re working yourself to death.”

He laughed at the irony. “And if I don’t keep working, we’ll all be dead.”

* * *

[He hadn’t been home in weeks.]

It was strange, if anything, to breathe air outside of the gated compound, breathing of course being coequal to inhaling filtered gas. It did not bother as much as it used to, hardly anyone even remembered what clean air smelled like.

Under the stellar light of the lonely street lights, dust formed and brewed and billowed in an enchanting dance, at least it would have been had it not been able to choke the life out of your lungs. The thought of loosening the straps of his mask had always intrigued Akaashi as he peered into the hazy storm. What would it feel like to breathe in the constant collision of nature and dust? Of course, he did not have a death wish, or maybe he did. He could never tell these days, his foresight becoming as murky as the wind that battered his window.

It was past curfew, he noted, minding the blazing red lights that pierced through the black out gloom like the eyes of beasts ready to pounce on their prey if they inched ever so slightly closer. The nights were the worst, the breeze from the bay would lay waste to the city and lift up any nanoparticle that tilled the cracks.

But on he carried, drifting off into the evered abyss, not minding the filth that lapped at his feet, not second-guessing the right turn he would make at the sharp south-east until he did, nor bothering to correct said turn right, adding on an additional minute into his journey, leaving him a few auxiliaric seconds to reach over to his mask and-

Had the darkness finally caught up and decided to swallow him whole? But the darkness was not warm, nor was its grip gentle yet firm, nor was it human in an ounce of its glorious essence. Yet, when the fading shadows told you to stop, you did just that, and thus stood to obey its every command.

There was no conversation in the peaceful treachery that was in one (1) Akaashi Keiji’s mind as he looked to the figure that was coated in dust and mist. He could have uttered a single word that commanded the darkness to let go, yet that seemed all too futile as he drowned in the waves of travesty that beseeched him. A silent argument might have passed between them as the seconds ticked by, until the one with the golden eyes that glistened against the black and red waded back into the quiet night.

He did not follow suit.

Stepping into the shadow box was an odd feeling to behold, not simply because of the suffocating odor of must and soiledness that would surely hang permanent in the barely habitable space, but too because of the fact that this was no longer a home to him, not that it resembled anything of. If your definition of home was shelter, a roof to shield from the howling winds then by all means call this a home, a shelter, a lodging for all your grandest desires, but if you like to see home as equivocal to comfort then you might want to turn to some different region in the Underworld. This was no home to him, the utterance of the word had been a forced habit when the silver keys were handed to him as a lonely teen.

Go off into the world, this is you sign, now leave. Typically unwanted was what he had always been, after all.

He would have preferred to be anywhere but here, frankly, yet this was where the universe had sent him to rot away as if the punishment of mere existence was not crippling enough for the anthropoid that roamed this smoldering rock. What had he done to deserve this? He couldn’t answer that, he knew there was no logical response in the first place.

He hadn’t remembered it to be so dreary, though, and he instantly regretted ever returning, but it was not like he had any choice. He would have been forcefully thrown out by the higher ups if they had caught wind of him willingly burning himself out again, which they ironically seemed to care about despite not giving a living shit about anything else. It was probably the fact that they would lynch wondrous amounts of revenue from whatever eureka moment he would implausibly muster up later on.

He didn’t even bother poking around to check for any stray dust mites that might have taken residence in his place. The door to his sleeping quarters had been locked shut, and by all means it looked about twenty-percent better than the rest of the apartment, so some shut eye seemed appealing right about now.

Good night to the madness, as he hoped to leave this world for a better place in Hell.

* * *

[Yet, they had to make him dream.]

It had been raining the day she died, it had been raining that morning, it was still raining.

“Momma, will you be alright?”  
“You’ll be ok, you’re stronger than I ever was.”  
“I wasn’t asking about me.”

They weren’t supposed to be out when it rained, even then as the sky was dusted only ever so lightly in the pygmy particles of acrid waste, rain from the heavens fell like acid, burning and hissing as they dropped. But they were to make this one last sacrifice for her, this is the day she had wanted to be buried, and thus be it.

“I think it’s time for you to go, sweetheart.”  
“But what will happen to you?”  
“Don’t worry about me, I’ll just be having a quick nap.”

A young child as old as he had been should have never had to witness their mother pull an empty promise from the universe’s back pocket, but it would have been too much of a shock if he had known exactly what would become of her as they laid her to spiteful sleep. The winds had choked her, they’d stifled the air from her lungs, and squeezed them shut.

“But when will you wake up?”  
“I don’t know, Keiji, I promise it will be soon.”

Even as he stood under the steaming black umbrella, it was still funny to him that those were the last words that had been uttered from blue lips as he was led out of the room right as her eyes rolled upside her head. They’d even been as empty as the life canister that had run dry only seconds later.

“We’re going now.” The older man pulled him from the crowd of condolences, and apologies in courtesy of the universal gods that cackled in their wake. The young boy, however, was confused. The casket hadn’t even been lowered into the ground, why were they leaving so soon?

“I wanna say bye to Momma.” His little hands dug into the leathery skin, reddened and bruised from years of scores and scrapes, but if the man could feel anything through the blistering heat of acrid rain, he did not flinch. He continued to push through black-clad mourners, shoving the little boy into the back of the hearse.

“You’re going home now, Keiji-kun.” It was his father’s final verdict, no one could argue with that, perhaps only one but she was now laying serenely in a scorched wooden box. Yet, the boy had her defiant spirit, and he desperately clung to the charred sleeve.

“I wanna say bye to Momma!”

“Keiji-kun, I swear to god, get in the car.” In a battle of wits, there was always a gracious winner, and a deplorable loser. In a battle of witless ardor, however, there was never a clear victor, and such was the case as the weathered man, and the obstinate boy stood at the edge of sobriety and fueled antipathy under the caustic sky.

“I don-”

Yet the older was a military man, and had always fallen back on force to solve the problems he did not wish to handle head on, and it was in such irony that he liked to do trivial things as if he were still at war. It was simply easier to shove the boy into the car, and slam the door than argue with the tempered spirit that had been rooted from a regrettable marriage.

More regrettably was the glass not soundproof, and incapable of being merely mute to injustice, the boy slammed and punched until the attention of veiled mourners turned to him, they would surely take pity on a boy that had been imprisoned by the remaining family he had left, whether his father could be called anything but. And the military man grew tired, and withered of patience at this creature of a son. And he was but a coward, and rather than confront the twin demons that were Phobos and Deimos, he threw the door open and struck the boy over the head with the soiled parasol.

To which Akaashi awoke in a cold sweat.

Curse the gods for never allowing him a moment of sleep, that is all he ever wanted yet that seemed to be the butt of all their cruel little jokes they played down from the skytop kingdom.

It was a dream, of course, it was an ever occurring dream, but the wounds never went away, the stitches never dissipated, he could still feel the blood dripping down his neck, and the way his father had done nothing but knock on the chauffeur's window to ferry him to whatever lambastable home he had been left, to which the answer was none.

He didn’t remember the rest of that day, nor did he want to, nor did he need to. It was all a hazy bad dream he liked to forget. He wished he could do that more often. Oh, and there it went again, reality in his brain, ringing and pounding to be let out. Really though, he would have let it out gladly if he could figure out how to. Yet, he could not and the alarm continued to chime back and forth, back and forth the bell went until he seamlessly remembered why it had been going off.

He got up, realizing he’d never changed out of his clothes from yesterday which was, frankly nasty, but by the time he reached the battered door, it had already been cataloged as another inconvenience in the life of one Akaashi Keiji. He’d forgotten to check up on this, he recalled, again owing to the fact that he’d dropped into dead weighted slumber the moment his head hit the pillow. He really shouldn’t have though, considering whatever was behind that door could have killed him.

An experiment gone wrong, he’d like to say, although gardening was not at all an experiment, more of an art that was fading with the evergreen leaves, and flower bearing stems that withered as the dust clouded the skies in its eerie sheet of death. Man made pollution had already been one thing to deal with, but the extinction of most flora from the face of the scorched earth had been another strike on the Doomsday bingo.

Most of the plants in the cellar-like room were dead, of course, although he wondered if a few had survived the shattering of the window. After the accident, however, he never went back to check. It was all too big of a risk to check for a hunch. Thankfully though, as he glanced through the glass, the patched hole in the wall that led to the god-forsaken atmosphere had held its place, acrid particles still flowed through the room happily, wilted leaves still fluttered to the ground despondently, everything was as it should have been.

What was next on the checklist? Mm, coffee probably but he’d have to push that to his arrival at the office since he never bothered to stock up his kitchen, nor did he think the machine still worked. So instead, he went off on his daily routine in this unusual setting, and really without much care for anything nor a willingness to linger in this accursed space, he walked out the door fifteen minutes later and not a minute more.

The night had given way to Aurora’s light, yet none paid more attention to it than they had to the darkness, for the clouds were thick today, and the sky had been covered, as always, in sheets of suffocation. If anything, this was the worse it had been in weeks, visibility meaning nothing but the palm of your hand. Of course, it was hazardous to travel in these conditions, and cars and the underground trains were preferable modes of transportation, but Akaashi wasn’t too worried. Not that he never truly cared about his well being, but the air around the city was still manageable despite the look of placid death it emanated. Japan’s air quality was still breathable to most international standards which compared it to the likes of the West where outdoor walking was strictly prohibited. There were rumors the atmosphere would reach out to you in the minute span of two minutes, and pull you into its grasp in less than that.

Yet it was still horrible to think that the world had been living with gas masks strapped to their faces, children under the age of ten often asked their parents what those strange images of clear, blue skies were as they had never seen anything of that sort. Humanity's greatest fault was not that her people lived in fear, and eternal panic, nor was it that the rest of the wild ridden earth had succumbed to the same foolishness, it was the fact that they never bothered to fix the mistake that glared them right in the face. He supposed they were military men after all, they were all but slightly cowards.

He did not make the same mistake, he remembered last night quite clearly for reasons he could not explain. He did not make the right turn into the white smog, instead heading forward until he reached the compound. A few attempts at a scan of the ID on an ancient machine that had not been cleaned in months, and the lifting of the railing as he strode homebound into bitten plaster walls for the nth time, unsure if he would be able to ever leave again. He didn’t mind that prospect too much, actually.

There was a briefing today, same as every week although he was sure nothing had changed, if only getting worse therefore he thought of them as redundant bureaucratic bullshit.

“Akaashi-kun, so nice of you to make it.”

“It wasn’t like I had much choice.”

“Fair enough. Nothing to report so you can go along.”

“No, there is something, uh, a request from public affairs, they want to send in a reporter from the news agency to keep up public appearance.”

“Why would we need to keep up public appearance when we don’t have one?”

“Transparency, Akaashi-kun, it’s good for public trust. He’ll be around for a few days so don’t be too surprised if you find someone poking around.”

And just like that it was over, so much for coming in early, now he had time to kill before he would be allowed to do anything which, again was an irony considering the current state of the world, and the bureaucratic paper pushers still counting pennies by the minute. Maybe it wasn’t so bad that the government was literally falling apart, it was run by pea-sized brains after all. It wasn’t like anyone could do it any better, they said. Actually, a five-year old child could make better decisions but let’s not go there. Since their egos were the base of their apparent wisdom, he was afraid shattering them would cause them to go inanimate, which would probably cause more problems than anything.

He really did hate this stupid place.

His office was six flights down, two doors to the left, why it was so far wayward, he did not know. It was probably a blue-handed gesture by the higher ups to preserve his molten solitude. He didn’t complain that much, really, the one living souls that ever came down here was Kuroo, and the occasional inspector who stopped coming after the 6th month. Akaashi wondered whether he’d succumbed to the air as well.

“Kuroo-san, what are you doing here?”

The other man was leaning against the wall directly parallel to the door of his office. He was tapping away at his tablet carelessly, rather out of place in his white lab coat against the grime caked walls. At the mention of his name, he looked up and gave Akaashi a smirk.

“Can’t I come visit?” He asked, but he knew better.

“You were here yesterday.” He said plainly, eyeing the door for any traps that he might have set.

“Baby-sitting duties.” He said with an exasperated sigh, as he turned back to the blue glow of the tablet. It was even more cynical than visiting, yet it sounded more truthful than anything.

“For who exactly?” To which he only gave a vague gesture to the door, and to whatever might be waiting inside. Not wanting to prolong Kuroo’s satisfaction any further, he opened the door and shut it behind him. There was nothing out of the ordinary, at least from where he could see. He strode through the expanse he had called home for the last two years, until he found the precarious anomaly.

“Oh hi! Don’t mind me.” He instantly regretted not staying in for an hour longer, his brain was twisting itself into a knot, and he was not feeling up for any social interaction other than with his dying plants, and to add further insult to injury, they’d given Akaashi him.

“So you’re the reporter?” He tried to bite back the spite fully aware that a certain someone was probably at the door listening in to whatever eventful conversation was about to unfold.

The man looked up momentarily from the wilted leaf he was inspecting. “Yeah! Bokuto Koutarou! You’re Akaashi Keiji, right?” He extended a hand of which, in normal cases, Akaashi would not take, but this was an atypical circumstance, and the gesture seemed more from a hand of the past than any living, breathing human.

“Mhm, when did you get here?” He had a vague recollection of locking the door last night, and he didn’t think Kuroo had the key.

“Only a few minutes ago, though I promise I didn’t touch anything. Except the leaf.”

It was the better hour of eight in the morning, and if he’d been awake longer than Akaashi had, where the hell was he getting this energy? It was, to be frank, exhausting just being in his presence, it was like he was feeding off your energy, making you drowsier in the process. If he had to stay here for a couple of days, he wasn’t sure whether he’d faint from fatigue or from sheer giving out.

“Ok, um, are you here for a tour, or a data analysis? If you need it, I could compile all my recent data and send it over to you instead of you having to stick around for the rest of the day.”

“Oh, that’s alright! I’d rather stay here.” That was just fantastic.

It was sort of laughable to Akaashi, how he had distanced himself from people so much, he’d forgotten what it was like to properly function when they were around, then lo and behold this man who’d probably swigged half a gallon of caffeine comes in and starts bouncing around, it was all too much for him. Was this part of his punishment from the universal jury, perhaps?

“Say, Kashi-kun.”

“It’s Akaashi.”

He continued like he didn’t register what he had just said, which in all honesty he probably hadn’t. “You wanna explain what all this is?” He gestured to the unkept wall of dried stems and acrid leaves, the kind that you’d find on the streets after a dust storm.

“Failed tests 1 to 1010. As you already know, the dust and acid in the atmosphere has killed the crops and everything living out there, and indoor farms don’t grow plants fast enough. No one knows why, and it’s the problem I’ve been trying to solve for the past two years.”

“And so far no successes?” He asked demeaningly questionably. It was about right for this situation.

He padded along the rows of carts and tables to the far right of the room. Test 1011, the most promising yet. “We’ve been getting good outputs from this one so we’re hopeful that this will be the first.”

“But in more than a thousand tests, you’ve had no viable test subjects.”

Don’t let his outwards demeanor fool you, that coat of shining light and inexplicable energy could have just been a cover up for the dark that hid inside. It didn’t scare Akaashi, he was all too accustomed to the same shadows, and thus he knew that there was something this happy-go-lucky reporter was not sharing.

“No.”

“Do you know what’s wrong?”

Everything was wrong, the water, the ground, the fucking air, everything was wrong. Plants were delicate things, much like humans, only surviving at the optimum conditions before collapsing to the unnurtured soil like they had those previous thousand or so times. He could not even count them as a thousand and ten since half didn’t even bother to sprout from their soft shells.

“No, one thing could be wrong, or many things could be at the same time, we don’t know.” He pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation which is the only emotion other than sleepiness that he’s been feeling for the past something and something weeks. It was his brand personality now.

“Mhm, well Kashi-kun, that’s all I needed!” He said in all his showman-like pizzazz, snapping the cover of his leather bound notebook back, clicking his pen in an invisible rhythm and spinning on his heel to leave Akaashi in a new state of perplexity. “See you around!”

* * *

[What would you do if the world stopped turning?]

How many times had he made this walk back in the last two weeks? It didn’t surprise him that he could count it on his fingers: two, one yesterday and one today. Next question, why did he have to make these walks back? To avoid being scolded at, or to avoid being booted out forcefully perhaps.

_That is not at all why, is it?_

_Shut up._

He could hate himself more than people allowed him too, he had the right to since his conscience was always so pessimistically pesky. To be fair, it was inherited from him. But it did not speak after the existential question, for the first time laying dormant for more than a walks home from the office which surprised Akaashi again since he’d gotten used to the nagging.

It didn’t turn up either as he took the elevator up, nor did it make a sound as he strode down the miserable corridor to the home that he never could consider a home and, Akaashi realized why.

“Kashi-kun?”

Gold against red against black against the shadows that clawed at his throat, and the hand that reached out to dissuade the air from running into his lungs, it was him that night. It all came back like a flash bang, startling him awake, despite not being any sensibly less.

“What are you doing here?”

It was aggressive, but he didn’t mind. What was he doing across the hallway from him? A fearful thought crept up his throat, one that he would have liked to push down, but it was persistent and he knew there was no use.

“Oh, I live here.” Bokuto said, pointing at the door he was about to crack open. That’s yours right?” He said, glancing to the identical one across from his.

Akaashi stood there for a moment, feet planted to the carpet until he had the thought of responding to the inquiry. “Yes, and good night.” He finished off, and without bothering to wait for a reply, he opened his door and slammed it shut behind him.

Was that too harsh? He was probably just trying to be polite, and like everything he did Akaashi started going over the whole situation down to the miniscule details of the grains of wood on the door as he unlocked it, to the confused yet placid stare that had been given through the closing door. He should probably apologize, but he really didn’t feel like begging for forgiveness today so he’d do it sometime in the next lifetime if he had that much left.

But this was the past coming back to haunt him. If he just ignored the creeping problem for a few more days, he could go on living his life in fear of certain death, rather than suffer in the existence of an owl fanatic. Then again, if he really thought that same owl fanatic was going to ever leave him alone once he’d come to register the situation, then that would have been a much more wistful dream than thinking the world could be saved.

The knock came at eight in the morning on a Sunday of all days. Akaashi hated being forced into taking the Sunday off but it had been given to him as a job requirement after the agency had realized how much he could overwork himself in a week. This wasn’t gracious at all, more like fattening a pig up for slaughter.

_Maybe if I don’t answer it he’ll go away._

_Do you think he’s really going to go away?_

He ambled in a daze, unsure of what he wanted, yet assured that this was not going to go in any way good.

“Morning, Kashi-kun!” He said it as if it was not eight in the morning on a sunday, but every bit like they were casual neighbors on a normal day in a normal world, happily greeting each other before going off into brunch. Akaashi could have even smirked at the thought if it had not been Bokuto Koutarou at his door.

“What do you want?” He asked groggily, determined to keep this short.

The other man looked confused, and Akaashi cursed at himself for not recognizing those gold eyes sooner. “Don’t you remember?” He asked, head tilted a little like those owls he loved.

“Of course I remember, ever wonder why I’ve been avoiding you?” He bit back the lashing tongue of steel that would have come loose. That would have caused problems in itself so he decided to hold back for a better time.

Yet, he remained unphased, standing his ground with his head still cocked waiting for the fire in his eyes to burn out before replying ever so joyously. “You wound me, also you like coffee, right?”

That last one might have been an early morning delusion. To be honest, Akaashi couldn’t tell the difference.“What kind of question is that?”

“‘Cause you’re always forgetting things, and you probably forgot to stock up on the stuff since you’re at work eighteen hours a day so I got you some!” He held up a bag which Akaashi could vaguely recognize as a paper bag from the shop down the street. How the hell he’d manage to find out that he liked coffee was one thing, but to get it from his regular? He smelled a scheming cat had to do with this.

“Are you stalking me now?” He asked matter-of-factly.

The other merely shrugged. “Just observant. Can I come in?” Although he didn’t wait for an answer, and before Akaashi could blink, he’d slipped by him and had shown himself into his apartment.

“You always did like plants.” He said as he poked at one of his artificial plant collections. It was ironic really, a botanist who collected artificial plants. Akaashi could never really explain it since the urge to add another plastic vegetation to the collection always came at random times without any clear trigger. He guessed it had something to do with the fact that he could never keep any real ones alive for a no-good amount of time.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you always liked plants, I remember how you used to pick flowers and count their petals, er, back when you could still find them outside anyway.” He said, before moving on to inspect the insignificantly small painting of a flower. “What’s that?”

He pointed to the fogged door, and the glass marred with fragmented shatters. He did not think anymore than a passing thought to what might be on the other side, but he had become so accustomed to its presence, he forgot it posed a point of entertainment for guests who came in and observed its stately ignorance.

“Don’t open it, it leads to the outside.”

He momentarily paused in his walk to peer through the shattered glass, and looked back to the younger. “Why do you have a room that leads to the outside? Do you know how dangerous that is?”

“Bokuto-san, enough with the pleasantries, what is it you really want?” He wasn’t equipped to deal with this at this hour. He’d planned on laying in bed for the rest of the day, preferably having another existential crisis, yet his desire to keep this short and sweet had just been thrown out of the window the moment he realized who he had to deal with.

“Is checking up on an old friend not a good enough reason?”

He’d also promised to hold back on the silver tongue of fire, but it came out in rapid sequence. “Friend? Is that what this is?” He laughed to himself ironically as always. “The last time we spoke was when I was seven, and now you spontaneously decided to show up at the office, in front of my apartment because you wanted to check up on me?”

Tick, tick, tick, the hands on the clock moved without any care for the situation that was unfolding. How typically inconsiderate of it. The older man stood there quietly before muttering something to himself and pulling a wooden seat from the small dining area. “Yes, actually, and the fact that I was assigned to this job helped.”

There was no lie which Akaashi hated most of all. It was strange, normally everything you’d want was for someone to give you the whole, undoctored truth, but not in this circumstance. This was not any ordinary situation, and he would have given anything to see it end as quickly as it had developed.

Yet he could not allow himself to anger, which was another thing he hated so much about this. He was harsh when he wanted to be kind, and passive when action was needed. He sensed, however, that it was not another one of his natural responses to a crisis. He never could stay angry at one Bokuto Koutarou.

He sighed and pulled the other chair from the table, spinning it on its leg to face the complete opposite direction. “I thought you were going into volleyball.”

“Sharp memory, but the global crisis kinda diminished the industry, don’t you think?” He shrugged like that decision alone hadn’t ended all the hours of dreaming of what it would be like to play on the world stage. One day, he had promised, but it seems the universal architects had given him the same dirty hand. “Dad wanted me to go into medicine, Mom said it was too dangerous so she forced me into Option #3 which was journalism.”

“I bet that’s been going well, it’s a natural fit.”

He looked over to him, and raised an eyebrow slightly incredulously. “If you mean that ‘cause I like to talk a lot, I can’t argue with ya.”

“Take the compliment.”

It took a moment for the thought to process. Perhaps it was that alienated that precious seconds were spent deciphering it’s true code. “I could never read you, ‘Kashi-kun.” He finally responded to which the younger only put his hand to his face in an effort to hide his annoyance.

“So, you still mad at me?”

“Anger does not dissipate in a matter of minutes.” That was, of course, a lie. Not necessarily the statement itself, but where there was no anger, it could not dissipate in any extent or period of time, and such was the case.

“Again with the words, I swear if you’d asked me who’d be standing in my shoes, I would have guessed it to be you.” He said passively,

He counted down to two before re replied. “Well, I like plants as you said.”

“And so you decided to work for the government, strange move, ‘Kashi-kun.”

Akaashi waved a hand dismissively. Decided was such a retrospective word, and a metaphor for what truly transpired. “The word recruitment is an allusion for forcible participation, Believe me if I had a choice, I’d be anywhere but here in this forsaken city.”

“You used to live here.” Bokuto leaned a little closer, he’d changed so much since the last time they’d seen each other, frankly Akaashi wasn’t sure if this was the same boy he had made acquaintance with all those years ago under the veil of the fog.

“Used too.” He corrected. Although he had not directly stated it, there was always a thin correlation between living and home, one Akaashi did not like. The implication was all too great, and it would have been fallacious to agree. “And Tokyo was never my home, at least not after my mother died. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“So why did you come home?”

It was eight in the morning, well half past eight almost and he’d like to go to plan with today’s agenda. “I didn’t plan on telling you everything that’s happened to me in this miserable life at eight in the morning.” He pushed himself up from the table and rubbed his eyes that were all but still blurry causing him to fall into sleep-deprived nausea. “I’d rather be left alone if that’s alright?”

“‘Kashi-kun…”

“Please.”

The other man did not object, whether he had any desire to do so or not, it would have been difficult to stand his ground in the quicksand. He hung his head in defeat, and too got up from his seat, giving one last glance to the morning fog on the window before

“I’ll see you tomorrow then. I’ll try not to touch anything too, if you come in late.” He finished off with a signature light-heartedness even when his voice was iron-laden heavy. He strode out without his normal ringleader-esque brilliance, almost an allusionary irony to say the least.

And there was quiet.

* * *

[Bokuto placated his entire existence in that very second.]

Sixteen years.

_Koutarou, what the fuck were you thinking? If you thought that he was going to allow you to waltz back into his life, you were dead fucking wrong._

But he could have hoped. After all, that’s the only thing left he could hold on to these days. They had been all damned to theis horrid existence and the shadow’s claws were just the nice red cherry on top. But by all means, carry on, carry on, into the silent night.

* * *

[It was all but quiet on this silent, dreary night.]

Akaashi had realized the power of a word uttered in contemplative despair as he surveyed the hallway to find no sign of one meddling reporter. Had he scared him off with a single plea? The Bokuto Koutarou he knew was resilient at his worst, and dissuasion was not something he liked to associate himself with.

His office was empty too, which was strange as well considering today was a Monday. Kuroo usually came over at whatever ungodly time he stayed up at, and trotted around the room until Akaashi unlocked the door for the second time that early morning. He was probably off baby-sitting.

A thought startled him at the end of the day as he trode to the exit path leading into the misty abyss that was the heart of Tokyo City. He had not gotten any real work done today and for that he berated himself, and would probably do so again once he got home, but the real catcher was why. He’d spent all his time with a nagging voice, and a meddlesome tone that struck him the wrong way, and he could neither make out what they were saying, or why they were singing that cacophonous harmony in his ears. That was, of course, until he realized that the point of his vexation happened to have golden eyes, and a shock of white hair, and probably an owl plushie. Strangely enough, that last item scared him the most.

And thus he descended into self-imposed madness, just as he had the moment after he slammed the door in his face that fateful night. But, no the architects needed their prized possession in one piece, so they decided to give Lady Fate a little nudge. She might have overcompensated a little bit in her benevolence.

“Akaashi-kun, can we talk?”

Again with the knocking, but this time it was much more persistent. Bokuto had probably realized that since it was seven in the evening on a Tuesday, he would not bother as many people with his ruckus than if it was eight in the morning on a Sunday.

He opened the door almost as sleepily dazed as last time. It was a permanent state at this point. “Bokuto-san, please keep it down, you’re going to get yourself a noise violation.”

“Ok.” He said in a surprisingly soft whisper, the old Bokuto he knew would have never been capable of anything but empathic surges of sound. “But please, can we talk for a sec?” He almost pleaded, and Akaashi could see that he was at the end of his string.

“Thank you.” It was almost too relievingly gracious.

He’d come straight from the compound as well, and still had his work files and notes in his hands. This had apparently been important enough that he’d completely ignored the weight of the pages, and decided to circumvent dropping them off at his own apartment which was but three feet away from him. As he entered, he dropped the files onto the table, and pulled a rickety wooden chair, same as he had the first time.

“What was it, ‘Kashi? What was the thing that made you snap?”

The question did not make much coherent sense to the younger. It was too broad, too vague, to which was he referring to because frankly, his very existence could have been one whole comedic warm-up and he’d never know. That very thought could have lit the fuse then and there had it not been for the overwhelming surge that pounded on the troubled mind. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

Bokuto leaned against the chair, causing the back to creak. He looked up and down, but never to the right where Akaashi had settled himself. “What did I do to make you mad?” He asked in no more than a battered-down whisper.

_Oh._

But the tempestuous mind only stopped to give a fool-hardy cackle before flying off to join the churning storm. It was so ironic, like so any little things, and such an allusionary diffusion of what reality had threaded through its needle. They swirled through the roaring typhoon, a multitude of broken dreams and worn-out hopes that had survived in the crevices of a dilapidated structure that had threatened to fall back into the ground it grew up from.

“You abandoned me, Bokuto-san.” He selected this from the tempest, it had pained him the most after all. As if the abandonment of one important person to the grasps of the Reaper, another came along but this time leaving him to journey forward alone along the yellow brick road.

The other looked up confused, and in obvious turmoil. What he had spoken was not true, quite the opposite in both aspects, or at least that’s how he knew the story to be. “But ‘Kashi, you left. Don’t you remember?” He asked with the memory of their last day at the park where he’d promised they would play again another day, and that last memory of the acrid rain on a gloomy morning as the casket was lowered into the ground, and the other drove off without another word.

“Of course I remember, and I know I left, thank god I did.” His eyes stung, his throat burned, he wanted to let loose the silver tongue, he wanted to lash out at everyone that had wronged him in these twenty-four years of miserable survival that would end with the culmination of his failures and wrongs and at the feet of the throne of Fate herself where she would congratulate her young jester before his slaughter. “But was it the fact that I left, the thing that warranted you to never speak to me again?”

It was unfair for such a thing to be asked. How could anyone reply to that with their whole heart? “I didn’t have a choice.” The other one said wayward of the surge that was to follow.

“Of course you did!” Akaashi practically yelled. “You always had a choice, it was me that never had one!”

“That’s not fair.” But only one of them thought so.

“How is it not?” There were tears streaming down his face, he could feel the hot streaks, but he did not bother to wipe them off, neither did he bother lowering his tone, or diminishing his temper whether he thought this was a rash use of action or not. “You were always freer than I ever was. You could have called, you knew where I was going. I waited for you, Bokuto-san, and yet you never came.”

Tick, tock, tick. Time went by without a care for the storm, and they stood there in unravelled silence, waiting for the other to utter another word. It was the former who spoke first and with a lead-laden tone that seemed to carry all the world’s weight with it. “It was an illusion of freedom. I was never free, if anything my burden was always crippling. I never called because, well because, I thought that if I stuck around, I’d be a reminder of her. That’s why you left, right?”

Anger did not dissipate in seconds or minutes or hours, it did not wither and die at the sound of an empathic excuse whether it had any validity to it or not, but it did not rage at the light of day, nor did it cry out in agony at the rise of the dawning winds, but when told to stop, it obeyed.

“I’m sorry about you mother.” The older continued, unable to look into the tempestuous storm more than he had when he first stepped through the worn-through door. “I never got to tell you that.”

And the anger was reigned in by the stablehand unwilling to let it go trodding into the wintrous night. “She’s a ghost of the past.” He said, shaking his head at the ground and cursing at the sky all the same.

“Mhm, aren’t we all?”

He was right, they were both ghosts of their pasts, the ones they tried to so desperately run away from, yet fate had led them here in togetherness for a reason. It seemed however, that only one was willing to entertain such a possibility. “Anyway.” He finished, shaking slightly but recognizing he’d overstepped his boundaries. “I just wanted to say I was sorry for all the trouble I’ve been causing you. I didn’t intend on any of this.”

And without another word, he started to move from the place he had settled himself in, but it seems that the younger had not satisfied his need. “You lied to me, Bokuto-san. You were never given this assignment, you volunteered.” He asked, having not moved from where he was seated.

The small smile was out-of-place in this broken symphony but weren’t they all? “Yes, I did. Now, you want to know why.” He said, biting his lip. He had not prepared for the water from the broken dam to flow this far, and he knew neither wanted to hear what he had to say.

“Was it because of me?”

But he never got a chance to reply. Like a form of divine intervention, or perhaps that overcompensation of Lady Fate, a single tattered paper flew from the latched folder that had just been picked up. It was crumpled and torn but there was no mistaking what information had been scoured into it in midnight black and blood red.

“What’s this?”

“Just some stuff I lifted while I was at the compound.” He said it as if this were a normal thing that happened, or that it was even legal in the first place. Akaashi was not staunch on obeying the biased rules, but the argument that had just taken place had inflamed his persona, and the added bonus of the value of what had been taken stoked the fires a little too much for anyone’s comfort.

“Bokuto-san, you can’t just take documents from the lab!” He growled in a low voice.

Then again, Bokuto was resilient, and he’d dealt with worse. “It’s justified.” He said plainly, but not bothering to reach out to seize the fibrous sheet from the other’s grip.

“How the hell is this justified?!”

“Look at it.”

“Not unless you plan on returning it.”

He sighed complacently, before marching up to the table and dumping spreadsheets and data, his life’s work onto the hardwood. He slid them next to the lone document and pointed to sets that were highlighted with an ominous red box. “What do you see?”

“Raw data.” Akaashi said, wildfire still burning, and head still pulsating at the fact that he might be considered an accomplice in the obstruction of government property. “It’s for the filters, inputs and outputs from the tests they’ve been conducting. I don’t see the need for you to steal these, they work.”

“Look closely.”

He reluctantly complied, reading each number he was not built on processing at this hour of the day. By the fifth line of what seemed to be binary, his eyes watered even more than they already had and his head spun with the weight of vertigo from an unknown source, he was about to return them himself when something caught his eye. At the far left corner was a neatly printed status report, but instead of where “success” should have been was a hastily scribbled on “failed trial.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How much do you trust the team handling the tests?”

That was an odd question, for an equally odd and hysterical situation, one that he had no choice but to answer. “Implicitly.”

There was a second that ticked before Bokuto looked back to the yellowed sheets, probably calculating his next move. “Then I suggest you start loosening that trust on them. They falsified the data.”

“What?!”

“Kaashi-kun, the filters never worked, this is proof of that. They lied to you.” The silver tongue licked out, yet he could detect no lie in any of those words. Perhaps it was the shock of the truth revealed to him in an utterly detestable way, but there was no plausible situation wherein this baseless claim could have been anything but fallacious.

“There’s no way, Bokuto-san. Why would the agency lie?” He said, an ironic laugh almost escaping his throat. He is not to be trusted, he reminded himself. He could have falsified the data himself to support his wildly spinning conspiracy.

“Public support, propaganda, the country is about to go into civil war, and so is the rest of the world. This was probably some made-up scenario the higher ups dreamed off to keep their place in power. They’re too prideful to lose.”

The world had just been pulled from under his feet, did the universal architects really exercise no mercy on their fallen subjects? He had always known, through a natural affinity that this reality they lived in was doomed to collapse into rubble at one point in the near century, but he had thought that a few years could have been expected of them before that happened. Yet, here was their messenger, standing over him delivering the decree that they had but mere months until their graceful fall into oblivion.

He got up, for no matter how much of an anarchical pessimist he had been spirited with, he refused to accept the end of civilization as they knew it this soon. The phone vibrated as he lifted it to his ear, although he didn’t know whether it was from the sound of the call going through, or the trembling shake of his hand. “Kuroo-san.”

“What is it, Akaashi-kun.”

“I have a question for you, and I need you to promise to answer it truthfully.”

“Alright.”

A shaky breath. “Do the filters work?’

Fucking answer, but there was no response. He desperately waited for words to form, reassuring him that this cynical plan that they’d cooked up would work, that their efforts were not in vain, yet he could only hear the levelled breaths of a man who had stood at the maws of defeat and fallen.

“Akaashi-kun…”

“Fucking tell me, do they work?!”

“We didn’t want to, but they told us that we had to or else…”

He didn’t have time for sorry excuses, and empty promises. They wouldn’t mean anything when they stood on the edges of the present and certain demise anyway. Yet, he could not help but pain at the lies that he had been fed, those that he had been too gullible to believe in. All those hours hanging on to the promises that he was still fighting a salvageable battle. For you see, he might have been a harker of the Day of Judgement, but he valued life, perhaps not his own, but the suffering subject the universal architects had forsaken to this scorched earth had learned to love the life that had once surrounded him, and he could not bare to see his hands tainted in the blood of their choked bodies.

It was all too much for the reformed, and he could only manage to slam his head against the beaten plaster in total exasperation for what he had just seen through the veil that had been lifted, it was all a white lie. How much more of what he knew was of the same kind as well?

“Akaashi-kun, come here.”

A hand reached out, but it wasn’t the shadows. It was warm, it was graciously human. There were whispers, some empty, some almost believable of comfort and ever so wistful promises that it was going to be alright, even when the world had stopped turning on its axis.

* * *

[But the system was heliocentric.]

“You’re up. I hope you don’t mind me staying here.” Bokuto said, looking up from the file he was reading. There was a concerned furrow on his face that was aimed at the man who had just come from the bedroom. “I was worried.”

“You didn’t have to.” Akaashi shook his head. He did not have the energy, nor the strength to summon the smoldering ingots of fire and anger. The revelation of the stark, unsalvageable reality they coexisted in had cut out the last light in him, one that he knew would never shine again.

“Is your head alright?”

“Wha-”

“You used to have migraines before too.” Bokuto answered to the confused gaping of the other. “You still act the same when you have them now.”

He couldn’t decide whether to march back to his room and bury his face in the sheets, or sit down at the table and wonder how much he actually knew about his life for the last twenty something years. He decided to do neither, however, deciding to instead lean against the wall in contemplative defeat. “Now I’m not sure if you’re really stalking me.”

No laugh rang out, no smile formed on either of their ragged expressions. There was only a sense of relief from the older, just grateful that at least his shitty sense of humor was still intact. Maybe all hope was not lost. “What are you gonna do now?”

He had a faraway look in his eyes which was only clouded over by the painful throbbing of his head, and the tight twists of his heart. “I don’t know yet.” He admitted. Whether or not he was going to report this, it would have meant certain death for the both of them. If he did keep silent, however, and by some miracle, the agency never got wind of this clear violation, he wasn’t sure whether he would be able to return the same as he was when he walked out of the gated compound for the last time.

“Well whatever it is, I’ll be here for ya, yeah?” Bokuto said, eyes radiating genuine concern and a dispelling of the possibility of another empty promise. If he was willing to put aside the troubled past, he could at least think to return the favor,

“I’d like that.”

* * *

[Name: Akaashi Keiji]  
[Position: Head Phytologist]  
[Official Status: Permanent Administrative Leave]

“Akaashi-kun, how long have you been up? It’s four in the morning.”

The younger showed no obvious signs of fatigue, but Bokuto had always been vigilant, and he’d notice the little things that the naked eye would normally ignore. Such as the case with the quiet demeanor of a man with a stormstruck mind, the howling winds and billowing rain could almost shield the apertuous alarms that rang through the typhoon.

“Not now.” There was a strain in his voice, and a slouch in his back that was characteristic to when he’d have a sleepless night. His hands continued to mark and trace along the data lines and magnitudinal charts that filled the small table, but even they had a slight quiver to them.

“C’mon.” He said softly, pulling him up from the table’s face. “Take a break, the world isn’t gonna end in the next hour or so.” he didn’t know that, of course, it could have ended in the next ten years, or ten hours, it could have ended right there and then, but that was the beauty of blissful ignorance.

The younger looked up, eyes not as vibrantly alert as they had been the first time they’d crossed paths on the wronged right turn. They were circled with dark grey, characteristic of the overworked, but this time it seemed to have only gotten worse. He nodded vaguely, and to his surprise he stopped peering at the charts to turn and face the window behind him. There wasn’t much to see as the fog had turned into an opaque sheet of mist. It was impenetrable too, even the stars that had once ruled the skies dissipating behind the mirage of humanity’s failure to act.

“Do you believe that we have a chance?” Bokuto asked mindlessly, before realizing that had probably been a bad opener.

Akaashi only smirked at this, focusing on the tiny crack that had started to bloom on the misty glass. “No.” He said with absolute certainty.

“So what’s all this?” The other asked, vaguely gesturing to the mountains of papers and files and graphs that were scattered on the tables and floor and walls. In the face of such chaos, one could easily render the younger’s earlier answer of “no” as invalid.

“I want to feel useful, so please let me be.” There was pain behind the feigned annoyance. He was a good actor even in his sleep-deprived state, Bokuto would give him that, but it was an obvious plea that he’d heard too many times from so many to not detect this time.

“Permanent administrative leave?”

“Mhm, they don’t want the tattletale going around and spreading whatever heresies they have hidden.” Akaashi said. They both remembered the phone call clearly, yes, it wasn’t a face-to-face meeting, or a formal letter, it was a phone call. But it didn’t feel like a bad break-up, no, it was much worse than that. A break-up would entail a possibility of happiness in the future, this was more like a divorce, and it was a separation from his life’s work, and it was something he was not sure he could live with.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright.” He said monotonous, and without a spare of hinted emotion. “I don’t think I could have continued anyway even if they did call me back.”

“Do they work?” To which a mildly insignificant hmph was given in reply.

The older waited for a solid sounding of words to which none came, and they sat there in blissfully ignorant silence against the backdrop of the unwinnable war that was humanity fighting ultimately fighting itself. “What does sunlight feel like?”

The other looked up from his daze in unmocked surprise. “You never knew?” He asked almost appallingly. Of course, the sunlight had not disappeared completely until around seven years ago, at least for most parts of the world, but in megacities like Tokyo, the smog had learned domination far before then.

“Nah, never left Tokyo, if you remember, smog here was always worse than the rest of the country.”

There was silence again as Akaashi closed his eyes thoughtfully, sifting through years of broken memories trying to find one buried under the hill. It was one of his last happy ones, of his mother playing with him during one of their summer trips to Yamanashi right before she dropped into her bedridden state. The skies over the prefecture were the last to cloud over, and those were the last sight of stars he’d ever seen. “Well, it was nice, definitely different from the light we have here.” He remembered the light pouring from the heavens, and a little boy running through the fields trying to catch a ray like a wayward butterfly. “When it touched your skin, it was warm, it made you feel alive. I used to dream of catching it in my palms and watch it glow and dance.”

“And how’d it look?” Bokuto asked, curious as to this phenomenon.

“Beautiful, golden, but you had to appreciate it at dawn when it pierced through the night and the stars. It made the whole world light up in pink and orange. I would do anything to see that again.” He sighed wistfully as he looked out to the grey in search of that fiery sky, to which it never came.

“If it’s as beautiful as you say it is, I’d like to see it one day.” Bokuto said without a hint of sarcasm or irony. Oh god, he was being truthful.

“Now is not the time for fallacious optimism. Do you really still believe we’ll be able to lift the smog?” Akaashi asked, out the wisteria flew, and in the raging stormfront. Cacophonous roars and jolted lighting clouded his vision and there the fire vanished, doused by the sheeted rain.

“Yes, actually. I do.”

He shook his head in a feeble attempt of dissuasion. “I’m sorry, but that’s rather foolish of you to think.”

“No, it’s not. It’s the belief I’ve hung onto all these years. Did you ever wonder why I stole those documents in the first place, or why I put all my faith in a damned project?” Bokuto asked him, still delusionally serious about this vision of his, that the smoldering world was still salvageable. “Because somewhere in this forsaken earth, there is always one who brings us back up from the ashes.”

He looked straight at Akaashi who all but understood these implications as another wave of early morning optimism that overtook so many into thinking that there was still hope, that there was still something to hang your dreams on before they were washed away by the sweeping tsunami. “Are you implying that person is me?” He asked incredulously, half expecting the other to laugh it off, or to even give a differential shrug.

But he didn’t, if anything the molten gold bore into him even stronger than they had before. “You’re still fighting, Kashi-kun. That’s gotta mean something.” There was a steel to his voice that was all but characteristic of the unwavering determination that he was known for. Akaashi could only help but lean into the current as it swept him away.

“But does it though? One man won’t be enough to save the world.”

“You never know, maybe it will.” He said, a light spring in his voice that seemed to shift all the world’s burden on Akaashi’s shoulders. “Let’s make a deal, yeah?”

“When you do find a cure, I promise that I’ll take you to see that fiery sky you loved, and you’ll be able to catch the light.”

* * *

[And you’ll be able to catch the light.]

It was forever winter in this damned world, three months to the day had passed by without a trace. Dust had clouded the skies in an impermeable sheet, and darkness moored on the earth’s dock. Cities crumbled, people died, it was but anarchical in all its glory, without the burning red blazes.

“Akaashi-kun?”

Heavy duty gas masks were required now, everywhere except rooms with air-gapped doors, and most of the population had gone into self-induced exile. Downtown Tokyo looked almost too apocalyptic to believe with steam-like smog billowing through once-crowded intersections and the air, whether it could still be considered that, choking in a matter of seconds.

The world as they knew it was coming to an end.

“Kashi-kun, what are you doing?”

He’d been spending more and more hours in the infected room, willingly bathing in the dust and filth that came flowing through the crack in the glass window. It was for some experiment, or so he claimed, yet he never spoke about what he truly did there. Bokuto could only hope to watch over him to ensure he would not try to breathe in the toxic waste yet again.

He was in there again, milling around and through the glass, he gestured for the other to join him in whatever he was doing. The cracked window seemed to have been covered up, and the lights had been dimmed. Only a single lamp emanated all the room in a ghastly glow, not to unlike the circumstances that were just beyond the plastered wall. Mask on, he waded into the room, careful to shut the door as quickly as possible as to not let any dust mites float out.

It was frigid, although that was to be expected as a consequence from the lightless circumstances that had befallen the hazardously cluttered area. The lamp stood precariously on a shelf corner, and with a single push it could have tipped into the inky abyss below. He inched closer, yet the yellowish glow was not enough to illuminate what had so drawn the younger’s attention, he could not even look up until they were standing shoulder to shoulder.

You couldn’t speak through the masks, but they never really needed to these days, and this situation was like every other, except there was no signal for the removal of your lifeline in the field.

“No! Don’t-”

He was not as quick as he had been that quiet night from what seemed like a lifetime ago, on that doubted right corner where blue met gold for the first time, without a word spoken. Just like it had been that night, it was over as quickly as the demon blinked and Akaashi pulled the mask off, dropping it to the floor. It was suicidal, and this was exactly what Bokuto had been so carefully watching over him to prevent, but as he counted down the seconds through the trapsied beating of his heart, the claws of the darkness never came.

“It’s ok.” His voice was muffled, but it was still clear. Bokuto only stood paralyzed as the straps of his own mask were undone, exposing him to the unexpected atmosphere around them. It did not smell like the polluted dust that lined concrete crevices, and brick grooves, it was like nothing he’d ever breathed in in all his years living in Tokyo. That was the problem, wasn’t it?

“Akaashi?”

“I did it, Kou, we did it.” He flipped a switch on the far right of the table, and the glittering glow of a ceiling lined with headlamps blinded the room in a much more powerful aura. It was strange, it was beautiful, but as his retinas accustomed to the new lumens, something even more shocking came into view.

“How-?”

The younger beamed at his creations, the first plants that had been born in months, perhaps the last surviving of their species. “You were right, it wasn’t the water or the soil or the air that was the problem, we needed to catch the light.”

“And this room?”

“23% oxygen, that’s higher than what was the normal even before the smog started. This room could have the freshest air in the country, probably even the world.” He nervously looked over to Bokuto who was at a complete loss for words. “C’mon, say something.”

“I guess I’ll have to fulfill that promise now?” He laughed lightly in this new atmosphere, one that he had not had the luxury of experiencing even as a little boy at the heart of the city of smoke.

He nodded, before looking at what remained of the shattered glass aperture, and out into the angry skies and clouds that rolled. All of this would soon seem like just another bad dream.“Mom was buried up in Yamanashi, if you want-?”

He caught him in a tight embrace, one he did not even flinch from receiving. “We’ll go once you’re done saving the world, yeah?” He said quietly, almost a whisper in the wind. “So I’ll be able to see the fiery skies, and you’ll be able to catch the light.”

[The darkness may come and overcast the fields with heathened skies, but darling, you are my light, and I will be there to catch you when you fall.]

**Author's Note:**

> and that's the end! the ending might have not been as satisfying but i hope you still liked it either way!
> 
> if you want to scream at me (or watch me scream):  
> Twitter: @sakuspvce


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